‘Good evening, Ma’am Iris,’ Mamdooh softly says. The deferential form of address has become so elided, so rubbed with usage that it is a pet name now, Mum-reese. ‘Have you been sleeping perhaps?’

‘No,’ I tell him.

I have been thinking. Turning matters over in my mind.

Mamdooh puts down a tray. A glass of mint tea, sweet and fragrant. A linen napkin, some triangles of sweet pastry that I do not want. I eat very little now.

The shiny coffee-brown dome of Mamdooh’s bald head is blotched with darker patches and big brown irregular moles. Out of doors in the harsh white sun I know he always wears his tarboosh. To see him lifting it in two hands and firmly settling it on his head before going out to the market is to be taken back to the time when the red flowerpot fez was essential wear for every effendi in the city.

Mamdooh is holding out my glass of tea. I take it from him, hooking my fingers through the worn silver hoops of the holder and poking my head forward to breathe in the scent.

‘Auntie has made baklava,’ he says, encouraging me by turning back the napkin on the plate.

‘Later. Go on now, Mamdooh. You must have some food yourself.’

Mamdooh will not have eaten a mouthful or taken even a sip of water since before sunrise. It is Ramadan.

When I am alone again, I drink my tea and listen to the sounds of the city. The cobbled street outside my screened windows is narrow, barely wide enough for a single car to pass, and beyond the angle of wall that shelters my doorway there are only the steps of the great mosque. The traffic that pours off concrete ribbon roads and submerges the modern city like a tidal wave is no more than a dull rumble here. Much closer at hand are shouts and laughter as families prepare their evening meal and gather to eat in the cool dusk. There’s a rattle of wheels on the stones and a hoarse cry of warning as a donkey cart passes by, and then a few liquid notes of music as somewhere a door opens and shuts. Hearing this, it might be the same Cairo of sixty years ago.

Some things I can never forget. I must not. Otherwise, what do I have left?

I close my eyes. The glass tips in my fingers, spilling the last drops of liquid on the worn cushions.